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The Rolling Stones’ ‘Blue & Lonesome’ is what we’ve hoped for: review

The Stones’ latest album comes very close to capturing the raw buzz of their earliest recordings.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. The band's new album "Blue & Lonesome" features a set of 12 fond, formative American electric-blues favourites from its collective youth. (Universal Music Canada)

The covers album tends to be the last refuge of the musically damned. Or, at least, the last refuge of musical acts damned to creative bankruptcy during their autumn years yet still reliant upon a fresh excuse to tour from time to time.

It’s not quite as ironclad a guarantee of a strained, painfully awkward lunge at cross-generational relevance to come as the dreaded late-career “duets” album, nor does it reek as desperately of “we got nothin’” as the “greatest hits re-recorded” album — or, worse yet, the “greatest hits re-recorded” acoustic album — but the covers album nevertheless rarely signals an imminent reblossoming of creative promise.

Leave it to the Rolling Stones, the pre-eminent standard bearers for the Pointless Superstar Return to the Studio, to rise above an extended run of iffy recordings that have long conditioned us to approach each new entry in the discography with “No Expectations” by tossing off a quick-’n’-dirty set of 12 fond, formative American electric-blues favourites from its collective youth.

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Blue & Lonesome is far from the slick, obvious (grand)dad-blues homage you might expect from the Stones at this juncture. Rather, it’s a rough-hewn lark reputedly knocked out mostly live in the studio over a scant three days at this time last year, when the band tried to kick stillborn sessions for a proper followup to 2005’s A Bigger Bang into gear by busting out some of the ’50s numbers by the likes of Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf and Magic Sam that first inspired its young members — now all, except 69-year-old “new” guitarist Ronnie Wood, well into their 70s — to start grinding out their own brash, transatlantic take on the material in London way back in 1962.

"Blue & Lonesome," the latest release by the Rolling Stones features some hot guest licks from Eric Clapton. (Interscope/AP)

From gnarly, choogling opener “Just Your Fool” through a positively filthy “Hoo Doo Blues” to the laid-back closing tangle of Dixon’s “I Can’t Quit You Baby” — which, along with “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing,” features some hot guest licks from Eric Clapton — Blue & Lonesome is cut from the same ragged cloth as those early singles. It starts crusty and stays crusty until the end.

Mick Jagger wails away more unselfconsciously than he has in eons, coming off more often than not like a genuinely weathered old bluesman, and blows harp with a fuzzed-out verve that would make Little Walter proud throughout. Charlie Watts’s drumming hits the pocket impeccably and Keith Richards and Wood saw, snake and snarl through riff after riff with a command of the idiom that could only come with, as Wood recently put it to Rolling Stone, “a lifetime’s research” into the African-American roots of rock ’n’ roll.

It would be a stretch, perhaps, to say the Stones sound as dangerous here as they did 54 years ago, but they do indeed sound authentically in love with the source material and thrilled to be taking a run at it again.

Amazingly, Blue & Lonesome — co-produced by “Glimmer Twins” Jagger and Richards and Don Was, an A-list studio hound not exactly known for his tactful handling of “legacy” acts (see, for instance, Bob Dylan’s Under the Red Sky or the Stones’ own dire ’90s offerings Voodoo Lounge and Bridges to Babylon) — actually comes very close to capturing the raw buzz of the earliest Rolling Stones recordings.

“Just Like I Treat You” bristles with the same energy that once charged, say, the band’s cover of “All Over Now.” The album was even tracked to tape for added authenticity. As Richards noted to the Guardian this week, “this is not digital crap.”

It’s not crap at all. Not by far. This is legitimately the Rolling Stones album we’d quietly hoped they might make again, yet had all but given up hope of ever hearing. Who knew?

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